The present invention relates in general to garment dry cleaning or the garment manufacturing industry, and, more particularly, to sealing the bottom of garment bags after the bagging operation.
In the garment industries, garments are shipped on hangers, hanging on ropes inside trucks. During shipping pieces such as belts, vests, light blouses and the like slide off the hangers and fall onto the floor of the truck, where they get soiled and lost from the original package. The strong bottom sealed bag prevents these garments or parts from being separated from the original package and from loss and soil.
Heretofore, these garment bags have been placed on the garments and sealed in a single machine. Often, this single machine carries out still other operations on the garments, such as top sealing and bottom sealing in a sequential step.
Such single machine operations have several drawbacks. For example, should one part of the machine break down, or otherwise require service, the entire operation must be shut down. Furthermore, in a single machine operation, the overall operation can only be carried out as fast as the slowest step in the multistep operation. Since these operations are sequential, the production ratio is lowered.
Still further, some portions of an operation expose garments to soil. These operations are somewhat acceptable if they occur prior to cleaning and bagging of the garments. However, during, or after, such cleaning and/or bagging operations, the garments should not be exposed to soil and oil.
The single machine multistep operations are not amenable to adaptation with other and varied process steps. Hence, such machines are not versatile.
The single machine operations have also been found to be noisy and energy-inefficient.
A very serious drawback to these single machine multistep operations is the difficulty of controlling such machines. Only skilled operators can exercise proper control over such machines. The cost of these machines is thereby increased.